The reaction to the royal family’s home movie footage is a reminder of how powerfully images from the past can explode in the present. The film, which shows the seven-year-old Queen unselfconsciously trying out a Nazi salute, is over 80 years old, yet it has detonated a storm of furious claim and counterclaim in a way no other kind of archive material ever could. Even if a letter were now discovered in the juvenile Elizabeth’s wobbly handwriting declaring her love for that funny little man Herr Hitler, it wouldn’t have quite the same capacity to shock.

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Eighty-five years before the little girl in the kilt showed off for the camera at the instigation of her Nazi-sympathising uncle Edward three small, plain women sat stock still for a photographic portrait. Photography was a novelty in the late 1840s, just as home movies were in the mid-1930s, and its subjects were similarly warned about accommodating themselves to the demands of a new technology. While the princess jigs and jogs, the three women sit poker straight, for fear of blurring the long exposure. As a result, they look so stiff and solemn that they appear to be practising for death. Some, such as the Yorkshireman who bought the image on eBay for £15, are convinced it is the only known photograph of the Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne.

The experts, at this point, aren’t dismissing the possibility out of hand. The clothes are right; the dates could, at a stretch, be made to work. And above all those plain, pinched faces fit perfectly with what we know of the literary sisters’ story: years of seclusion and hardship followed by tragic early deaths. No wonder the women in the picture can’t risk a smile.

There is nothing more thrilling than when the past springs back to life and taps us on the shoulder. And, given the pace of technological change, more and more bits of the olden days are being given their second wind. Old-fashioned fieldwork may have located the crooked bones of Richard III under a Leicester car park, but it is thanks to DNA extraction and clever imaging software that the scientists have been able to build a simulacrum of the Yorkist king complete with thin lips, jutting jawbone and – a big surprise – blue eyes and fair hair.

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We do need to be aware, though, that these acts of miraculous recovery can take us only so far. While a jigging Princess Elizabeth and the mournful Brontë sisters may appear to fulfil our desire to reanimate the past, to puff breath into desiccated body parts and get the blood pulsing round the archive, they always stop short of full resurrection. For one thing, technology always skews the result, so that Princess Elizabeth is obliged to do something spectacular with her limbs for the movie camera, while the Brontës are required to look grim for their studio portrait. Richard III’s reconstructed head can’t do anything much except stare, which is probably why his looks still menace.

We are left with a profound sense of thanks that the little girl in the kilt was given the chance to put things right

What these visual artefacts can never do is give us context. While movie footage or photographs are brilliant at freezing time, they are frustratingly dumb when it comes to giving a full account of themselves. In the case of the young cavorting Queen, it is not apparent what had been going on that day. But assuming this film was taken in the summer of 1933, then her Uncle Edward was months away from consummating his affair with Wallis Simpson, the one that would bring the monarchy to the brink of extinction and propel Elizabeth to the throne.

When you know this, then Edward’s tasteless attempt to get his little niece to do a Nazi salute takes on a whole new resonance. Far from being an unconvincing revelation about the political sympathies of a seven-year-old child, those 17 seconds of juddery home movie become an exhilarating reminder that history does sometimes turn out well. Edward’s moral torpor, his inability to consult anything but his own tawdry vanities, is sharply on display in this pastoral scene gone wrong. What we are left with – but only if we read the image in its full context – is a profound sense of relieved thanks that the little girl in the kilt was eventually given the chance to put things right.

Buckingham Palace has refused to be drawn into the debate over the royal family’s private archives amid mounting pressure to release historical documents following the publication of a video showing the Queen performing a Nazi salute in the 1930s